Three Rules

I've been an atheist for eight years now and I've had a lot of arguments with believers of every imaginable walk of life. Arguments with Fred Phelps style nutters are actually relatively rare. Far more often, I find myself debating basically decent people who simply cannot fathom my worldview. Not many generalizations of the faithful are helpful in the pursuit of a productive argument. Stereotyping is, more than anything else, utterly incapable of earning its keep in a theological discussion. Most of what I shall proceed to say in this article is from three years of making mistakes very common in the atheist community. As I've stated before, the atheist community and I are actually not on the best of terms with one another. That's a long story, and not one for this article, but let's just say Secular Student Society hates my guts and leave it at that. My point in bringing it up in the first place is that I am something of an outsider when it comes to nearly all groups with whom I presently or formally have an association, with the sole exception of cigar and pipe smokers group, of which I am a member of only the highest of standing. Perhaps this is because I am autistic and have the requisite gift for alienating people. In any event, and in keeping with that idea, atheists and believers alike may find themselves in opposition to the points made in this article. Atheists will hate me telling them to drop some of their arguing methods and believers will hate me because I am an atheist with ideas on how to better debate them. There are three rules I have for debating believers.

1. There are as many religions as there are believers.

The bedrock that many atheists try to hit when debating a believer is that a given believers will share beliefs with another believer of the same creed in both the short and broad strokes. Likely, believers would claim this themselves most of the time, but I've been paying a great deal of attention and they all believe in different gods, have different ideas about what scriptures mean what things. Carefully combing a given scripture for morally indefensible beliefs is a popular pastime of atheists and I can tell you from experience that it is utter folly. Thrust and parry in whatever way seems most bulletproof to you and I promise you there will be a deft countermove awaiting you. They'll tell you that slavery meant something different back then, that God is morally superior to humans and is allowed to order genocide, that Jesus rendered all the Old Testament's nastiness null and void, or that they simply interpret the relevant scripture in a way that, more often than not, is the only time you've heard any believer interpret that scripture in that way. List the atrocities committed by their religion and they will go to supine lengths to exonerate their particular sect from culpability. You can combat all of this by keeping everything to the broad concept of religion as completely without evidence, in any event, and generally responsible for promoting irrational thought and dogmatism, which has done much to add to the surplus of human misery. Do not attack their religion. Lacking a dog in this fight, don't pick on a given one.

2. Modern theological discussions always come back to morality no matter where else they may meander.

Much of modern religion presents itself as a way to explain whatever science cannot understand. This is known as the God Of The Gaps theory and the idea is that God exists in whatever gaps are currently present in scientific knowledge. Wiser theologians have properly surmised that this type of theology results in a shrinking God that gets smaller and less relevant with every advance in scientific understanding. With science moving ever greater in its rate of progress at explaining reality, the eventual terminus can only be a God so irrelevant that he may as well not go to all the bother of existing in the first place. Moral instruction is viewed by theologians as the best place to stake a claim to an area regarding which science has traditionally declined to even express an opinion. From there, we're off to the races. Every atheist has heard that the Stalin and Hitler regimes were the most evil of the 20th century because they were atheist. Therefore, every atheist must be prepared to debunk these claims. Hitler is an easy one to debunk for a few reasons. His Third Reich was actually Christian enough for its military to wear belt buckles that read, "Gott Mit Uns," which translates as, "God Is With Us." He took Catholic Antisemitism embodied in the Blood Libel and Passion Plays as his inspiration for The Final Solution. If The Vatican took issue with this, they had a funny way of showing it by making Hitler's birthday an official holiday, making a treaty with him in exchange for total control of German education, and arranging passports and other assistance for fleeing Nazi war criminals to heavily Catholic South American countries. Stalin was an atheist, but is important to remember that his rejection of Darwin and Mendel's theories in favor of a communist biology created by a man named Lysenko. This, "science," retarded Soviet biology in ways that still plague Russia to this day, resulted in famine that killed staggering numbers of people, and was expected to be taken on faith or out of fear for one's life. Everything Stalin did with communism made it little more than a political religion with no more evidence for its claims than one would find in supernatural religion. Once you've debunked the Hitler/Stalin argument, you'll need to point to how science can determine proper morals. For that, simply read Sam Harris' book The Moral Landscape.

3. You must know the proper definitions of atheist, agnostic, and similar terms.

It took me years before I stumbled upon the correct definitions of the terms, "atheist," and, "agnostic." Like most people, I had always thought that an atheist is someone who is sure there isn't a God and an agnostic is someone who isn't sure one way or the other. Actually, the terms mean distinctly different things than those popularly understood connotations. Most crucially, the terms are not mutually exclusive. So the scenario, in my own case, usually goes something like this. "You're an atheist? Wait, can you prove there ISN'T a God? If not, then, sorry buddy, you're an agnostic." Well, that's not at all true. To my mind, the correct ordering and phrasing go as Penn Jillette explains it, which goes something like the following. "Is it possible to prove God doesn't exist," to which I would respond, "No, because it is impossible to disprove any negative. You can't disprove that I have a best friend who's a platinum dragon, but you don't give any credence to the idea because there's no evidence for it either." The Flying Spaghetti Monster, Russell's Teapot, and The Invisible Pink uniform all draw upon the absurdity of relying on this argument to argue for religion. Now, the second question ought to be phrased, "Do you believe there is a God," to which I would rely, "No." Therefore, I am an atheist because I have no belief. Of the rules I list, this may seem the most unimportant, but it is actually crucial. As atheists go out there, they need to know how not to get tripped up and bogged down in terminology.

-Frank